The icon for the Gaia Mythos is a coco de mer with
cosmic detailing: sun and moon motifs with the emergent earth
indicated by a "cross, " a groove where "X marks the spot." Where the treasure is found. The story that goes with this
image explains what it means
to be at once the most adaptive and disruptive species inhabiting
this
planet,
Earth. The Gaia Mythos, a coevolutionary narrative,
encodes some closely guarded
secrets of the Pagan Mysteries. Yet this story is no elite
affair, and the "secrets" it contains are open to anyone
with the will and capacity to comprehend it.

To love to know, and to love what you know, is the Gnostic way.
For those who come to love it, the Sophianic Vision of the Mysteries is a touchstone of rapture and revelation.

Gnostic Cosmology

The story of the Aeon Sophia, the "Fallen Goddess" is only found in
its complete form in Gnostic materials, and paraphrased in some Christian polemics directed against the Gnostics, and even in these sources it only survives in fragments. Technically,
this story is a cosmogony, the description of how
a world system or cosmos originates; but it is more easily
treated as a cosmology,
the description of how a world system operates, based on how
it originated. Fortunately, the slim evidence for Gnostic
cosmology is supported by
an array of classical lore, cross-cultural mythology, and indigenous
wisdom. In Greco-Roman mythology, for instance, the theme of"the
marriage of Ouranos and Gaia " asserts a special
link between the celestial realm and Gaia, the living
earth. Ouranos,
the Greek word for "heaven," refers to the Pleroma,
the realm of the gods, or, in astronomical terms, the galactic
core. The mythic marriage of
the Pleroma and Earth is consistent with the Gnostic scenario
of the Aeon Sophia who plunges from the galactic core to be
metamorphosed
into the planet we inhabit. Sophia is exiled from the Pleroma
and "grounded" in
the terrestrial domain, but precisely because of the unique
conditions under which earth was formed, our planet remains
intimately linked
to the cosmic center, the galactic core itself.

I have argued
elsewhere in this site that a great deal of mythology can
be read as astronomy. (This can be done without going as far
as
Santillana and von Dechend who propose in Hamlet's
Mill that myth is nothing but encoded astronomy.)
The transposition of myth into astronomy is, of course, a
creative act
that requires the use of imaginaton—a disciplined exercise
in mythopoesis, myth-making. The Gnostic creation
myth provides a unique
set-up for such an exercise because it presents just enough
clues to whet the imagination and entice us to
picture what happened
to the Pleromic Goddess, Sophia. What we know today about
the large-scale structure of the galaxy, the birth of the
sun, the formation of the
planets, and the current position of the solar system in
the galactic limbs, presents a background for the recovery of
Gnostic cosmology. At best, we may develop the sacred narrative
into a visionary model of our own making. Doing so, we come
to participate empathically in the experience of the Earth
Goddess, Gaia-Sophia.

As suggested in Sharing the Gaia
Mythos, the purpose of humanity in
Gaia's life-process resides in on our capacity to remember and retell
Her Story. Metahistory ipresents a critique of history and the beliefs encoded in it,
but it also proposes a recall of the mythic dimension of
our own species story. Whatever assists to support that recall is welcome. The reason for converting the
mythico-mystical language of Gnostic teachings into the concepts
of modern astronomy is not
to use science to legitimate Gnostic vision, but to link our
current picture of the cosmos to an ancient seminal visionary
experience whose slight
traces can be discovered in Gnostic writings.

Even with scientific correlations, however,
it is extremely difficult to construct a coherent version of
the Fallen Goddess scenario. Considered strictly on the basis
of surviving texts,
there is no "Gnostic cosmology," or almost none.
The textual material is in most instances corrupt and unreliable. The Nag Hammadi "library" is
a pitiful heap of remnants, like a handful of glass shards
from a shattered
stained-glass dome. These documents were translated into Coptic
from "Greek
originals," scholars say, but there is no way to know
if the supposed Greek texts were actually first-hand Gnostic
writings. After countless readings,
I am inclined to see these texts as study notes, in rough
and incomplete form. The Coptic reads like a slapdash translation
made by scribes
who did not altogether understand what they were translating.

Fifty fragmentary documents whose content is
largely incoherent and maddeningly inconsistent is all
that remains
of what once was countless thousands of parchments and codices,
including many works on geology, astronomy, and mathematics,
known to
have been written
by initiates of the Mystery Schools. To fill in what is missing
or badly preserved in the Coptic treatises from Nag Hammadi,
we must turn to paraphrases
found in the polemics of the so-called Church Fathers who opposed
the Gnostics. For certain episodes in the scenario of Sophia's fall and her embodiment
as Gaia, for instance, we have to rely on Irenaeus, a Christian
bishop who wrote Against Heresies around 180 CE.

A full-scale narrative describing how Sophia
becomes Gaia cannot be developed without making inferences and extrapolations.
The Fallen
Goddess scenario relies at key points on such embellishments, yet the recovered version is not the invention of this author.

Lucky Thirteen

The thirteenth packet of the Nag Hammadi library consists
of eight papyrus leaves, a mere sixteen pages. It is the only
codex (book of
bound leaves) found without a leather cover, and
but for one other codex (II), its pages
are not numbered.
The texts are incomplete,
and the first two leaves appear to have almost been burnt.
They are not charred around the edges, but smoke-damaged. The
Arab family whose
sons found the codices in a cliffside cave in December, 1945
are known to have burned some leaves to heat water for tea.
During the 4th century
CE when the cache was buried, fanatic ideologues called the "Church
Fathers" demanded that all Pagan and Gnostic writings
be burned. The first pages of codex XIII seem to have quite
literally been snatched
from the flames.

Gnostic instruction is knowledge that frees. Because this knowledge is precarious,
so is freedom.

The sole complete text in codex XIII is Trimorphic Protennoia,
a title rather grandiosely rendered as "The Threefold
Divine First Thought." The scribal hand that copied it
resembles that of codex II, but is a more rapid, cursive version,
as if it were written in
a rush. The experts suggest that it may have been written by
two hands, that of student and instructor. (CGL5V, V, B2, p.
362. For my system of references see Gnostic Materials.) This
opinion accords with my own (non-expert) view that the Coptic
treatises
are student notes, or notes dictated by masters to novices.
The materials
found under the cliff of Jabal al Tarif may indeed be "Cliff
Notes" (the
trade name in England for study guides to classic works, such
as those of Homer and Shakespeare).

The structure of Trim. Prot. is distinctive. It builds
like a fugue in two voices, first-person and third-person.
The longer, dominant
passages are called "first-person aretologies." These
declarations use"I" for a supernatural agency
that declares its traits and actions:

I am the thought that dwells in the light,
the movement that underlies all that endures,
She in whom everything resides, the first-born of all those
who exist in the presence of the All.
I dwell in those who came to be.
I move in everyone and I delve into them all.

I walk uprightly and those who sleep, I awaken.
I am the sight of those who dwell in sleep.
I am the invisible one within the all.
It is I who counsel those who are hidden... (Trim. Prot. 35: 1-25)

The character of the aretologies is lofty and poetical. The content
is visionary, so this kind of text is called a "revelation discourse." Alternating
with the aretologies are passages in the third-person, apparently intended
to indicate the student's comprehension of the discourse, or perhaps
they are the master's notes interpolated to help the student comprehend.
The subject of Trim. Prot. is the central theme of Gnostic
cosmology: the descent of the Aeon Sophia into the chaotic realm beyond
the bounding membrane of the Pleroma. Her plunge is described in three
distinct stages or increments:

First, Protennoia is the voice of the First Thought who descends
first as light into darkness to give shape to her fallen members.
Second, Protennoia is the Speech of the Thought who descends to empower
her fallen members by giving them spirit or breath. Third, Protennoia
is the Word or Logos of the Thought who descends in the likeness
of the powers, assumes a human appearance, introduces the illuminatory
baptismal light of the Five Seals and restores her members into the
light. (NHLE 1996, p. 511, commentary by John D. Turner)

Protennoia means "primary mind intention," or
First Thought, as the scholars have it. This word is packed
with
uniquely Gnostic nuances. "Proto" means both "first,
primal or primary" and "generative." Protoplasm
is the biological basis of all life-forms. A prototype generates
all later and subsequent
types. Ennoia is a compound of en-, "intent,
will," and noia, a variant of nous, "intelligence,
mind, capacity to know." The Greek word nous defines
in all Gnostic teachings the endowment that Sophia
and the Pleromic
gods confer upon all sentient beings, but in a partular manner on the human species. Our wisdom endowment is nous,
a dose of divine intelligence, the power to know what gods
know.

Nous is
a faculty, not a mark of identity. Whoever cultivates nous will enjoy god-like enhancement of awareness and perception, not the aggrandizement of self to the status of deity. The goal of Gnostic spiritual practice was, and still is, not to see ourselves as
gods but to see as gods see: in rapture, awakened to the divine presence in all things, feeling the shock of the beautiful.

A World-Changing Message

Scholars working in teams over decades apply meticulous care in attempting to eke
out the meaning of obscure texts such as Trimorphic Protennoia.
They endlessly scrutinize the variations of grammar, spelling, handwriting.
They write papers and sometimes entire books on a single treatise.
They hold symposia to discuss the historical and philosophical background
of the Gnostic materials, usually with the aim to learn more about
the origins of Christianity, rather than to understand what the Gnostics
had to say in their own terms.

The result of all this work on the literal meaning of
Gnostic texts is that the message they contain is
overlooked, if not entirely lost. No scholar today regards
the original message of Gnosticism as worthy of interest. This
is the strange impasse into which Gnostic studies have led
over
the last fifty years. About one third
of the writing in Metahistory.org is devoted to recovery of
the original Gnostic message.

To recover and reconstruct the story of Gaia-Sophia, we must consider
what the Gnostics may actually have known about cosmic matters. The
assumption that Pleroma, meaning "fullness, plenum," refers
to the core of any galaxy, is the first step in allowing that Gnostics
had real-world astronomical knowledge. In short, we infer that
Pleroma means galactic core (but not only that), so that we can develop
certain imaginative clues in the Coptic material. (It could be argued
that Pleroma is purely a metaphysical locus outside time and space
which ought not to be "reified," made into a concrete thing.
For my response to this objection, see reality in
the Lexicon.)

Scholars do not make such inferences because the limits of
their discipline do not allow them to suppose that genuine
astronomical knowledge could
be encoded in mystical writings. Obliged to stick to the textual
evidence, they never consider what kind of evidence
might be provided
by direct mystical experimentation, the practice of Gnosis,
cognitive ecstasy. Yet if scholars today do not have experience comparable
to that of the Gnostic seers, how can they discover what these
visionary texts can tell us? Lacking the evidence of
experience, the
experts are constantly forced into omissions. For fear of making
false inferences, they make none that cannot be textually supported.

No scholar would do what I am here attempting with the Gnostics
materials. But for that matter, if I may say so, no conventional scholar could do
what I am attempting. If there is a profound world-changing
message in Gnosticism, as I believe
there is, it has little chance of reaching the world at large
through the filters of scholarly exegesis. Discerning the message
Gnostics were trying to give is my overriding concern. Thus
I extrapolate, as best I can. I
extrapolate carefully but vastly,
because the scope of Gnostic visionary wisdom was vast, as
far as I can tell.
My inferences are based on a lifetime of experimental mysticism,
as well as thirty years' study of the materials and an equivalent
period
of involvement with mythic cosmologies, modern astronomy, astrophysics,
and naked-eye skywatching.

I am not alone in attributing profound astronomical knowledge
to the Gnostics. Jacques Lacarriere, a comparative mythologist
and cultural
historian, has written the single most accessible book on Gnosticism,
demonstrating a complete departure from the usual dismissive
treatment. Granted, his book The Gnostics is a poetic
meditation, rather than a scholarly exegesis such as one finds
in Pagels
and King. Yet Lacarriere
presents brilliant insights that enable us to appreciate the
spirit of Gnosticism as such, on its own terms, rather than
as a footnote
to Christianity. He asserts that knowledge of the cosmos among
the Gnostics was not a product of fantasy, or "metaphysical" speculation,
but derived from observation of the sky, that is, from encountering
the real, sensorial universe. For the Gnostics, the sky is “the
first source of knowledge”; astronomical perspective
was “implicit
at the very starting-point of their thought” (p. 16).
I couldn't agree more.

Lacarriere also extrapolates Gnostic material in ways conventional
scholars would find unacceptable. He proposes that Gnostic
seers could look into many worlds, and so were able to detect
certain cosmic
factors specific to the world-system we inhabit. As
we shall see, Gnostics taught that our world is aberrant, anomalous.
Fascinating remark there. But hang on a minute. How could
they have known this to be so if they did not have something non-anomalous
to compare it to? Did they have direct perception of multiple worlds? "One could say that these other worlds,
presaged and divined by Gnostic speculation, in fact represent
what modern astronomy
calls nebulae, spirals, and extra-galactic clusters” (LaCarriere, p.
18). Some Gnostic texts assert that there are many Pleromas.
We know today
that there are billions of galaxies. The story of the Sophia
Aeon concerns one Pleroma in particular, the core of the galaxy
that harbors the
solar system in its spiral arms. The mere suggestion that mystics
who lived 2000 years ago could have had concrete knowledge
of events specific
to our galaxy is, of course, outrageous.

How all the more outrageous it will be, then, if what they knew turns
out to be true.

Sophia's Passion

As noted above, Trimorphic Protennoia touches on the central event of the Gnostic world-vision: the descent
of the Goddess
Sophia. The role of the human species in the life of Gaia is
set up by the triple descent of Sophia from the Pleroma, especially
in the
third phase. To show how this occurs, we need to convert the
mystical and theological shorthand of Trim. Prot.,
summarized in Turner's paraphrase (above), into cosmological
terms. The general outlines of
the Gnostic origin myth will then become clear. Then, by inference,
we can begin to explore the role of humanity in Gaia's Dreaming
of the world
we inhabit:

First phase: Sophia's passion causes Her
to plunge through the Pleromic membrane, rather than emanate
through it and remain
centered in the galactic core, as Aeons normally do. Upon departing
from the core, She confronts the chaotic fields of elemental
matter in the galaxy's outer limbs. Automatically, Sophia begins
to organize these elemental
fields. "The First Thought descends first as light into
darkness to give shape to her fallen members." I have
proposed that the Aeons are massive currents, torrents of Organic Light. We may imagine
them as immense pulsations
of luminosity in a superdense mass-free state, torrents of "luminous emulsion" (Lacarriere,
pp. 36, 83). Aeonic currents are alive, coherent and self-organizing (autopoetic).
The Coptic materials use the metaphors of "fountain" and "spring" for
the Pleroma, and "torrent" for the Aeons. When this
torrential outpouring encounters elemental matter (in scientific
terms, unorganized atomic
states), it configures that matter into organized states
and processes.
The mere presence of Sophia in the outer limbs imparts order
to the chaos
of
the elements.
Today
the process of spontaneous ordering is recognized
as a universal function in nature. It is called autopoesis.

Second phase: As Her impact deepens, the chaotic
fields of elementary matter in the galactic limbs not only become organized,
they become animated, taking on a life of their own. In other
words, Sophia's life-force comes to be imparted to the chaotic matter in
the zone She has entered. "Protennoia is the Speech of the Thought
who descends to empower her fallen members by giving them spirit or
breadth." In this phase, Sophia actually produces a rudimentary
world-system, but this is not yet the planetary system that will
emerge when She has fully metamorphosed Herself into the earth.
This is the most complicated episode in the Gnostic origin myth, for
it involves a kind of pseudo-creation, indicated by the Greek word stereoma:
a stereoscopic projection, like a hologram. This hologram will eventually
condense into a planetary system including the earth that revolves
around a central star, the sun.

The stereoma is the virtual world of the Archons, a species
of inorganic beings produced by Sophia's impact upon elemental
matter before She
metamorphoses into the earth. The name Archon comes from the
Greek root archai, "before, preceding." (Adjective:
Archontic.) The Archons are so called because they and their
world arise before the organic structures
of life on earth emerge i.e.. before the earth itself is formed from Sophia's currents. The nature and actions of these weird
entities were closely guarded secrets of the Mysteries.
Detection of the Archons and interpretation of their relation
to humanity was an occupational challenge for Gnostic seers.
Archontic activity
is a key factor in the Fallen Goddess scenario. (More below
on this bizarre development below, and in the companion essay, Alien
Dreaming.)

Third phase: In this phase the Earth as we
know it emerges as a conversion of the passions of the
Aeon Sophia. "Protennoia
is the Word or Logos of the Thought who descends in the likeness
of the powers..." This vague and baffling language means
that Sophia, the supra-material Aeon, reproduces Her own attributes
in a material
world: She gears down ("descends") and in a manner
conformable with the elemental powers She encounters in chaos,
the zone outside the Pleroma.
As an Aeon, She is an inconceivably massive current, alive
and conscious, but by merging into the dark elemental matter
of the galactic limbs
She becomes transformed "in the likeness of the powers
(those elemental forces)," and consequently plunges into
semi-unconsciousness. In terms of cosmic physics, Her plasmatic
currents convert into
mass, and that mass eventually becomes the earth. Sophia "morphs" into
a planetary body which immediately becomes captured in the configured fields of non-Pleromic matter, the Archontic system of celestial mechanics.

One of the difficulties in recovering the Gnostic origin myth is that
textual accounts of this critical phase of the story are lost. Descriptions
of the conversion of Sophia's passions into the material earth, which
certainly existed in written versions, have been almost entirely eradicated.
The most complete version of this event is not found in the Coptic
sources but in the polemical writings of the Church Fathers. To protest
what they regarded as the ornate complication of Gnostic cosmology,
the Fathers had to paraphrase the material they so detested. The most
complete description of Sophia's devolution into a planetary body is
found in Against Heresies by Irenaeus. Chapter IV of Book
One of this immense tome is entitled "Account Given by the Heretics
of the Formation of Achamoth, Origin of the Visible World from Her
Disturbances." Achamoth, a corruption of the Hebrew Hochma, "cosmic
wisdom," is a Jewish term applied by Gnostics to the Fallen Sophia.
Ireneaus writes:

The collection of Achamoth's passions they [the Gnostics] declare
was the substance of the matter from which this world was formed.
From her desire to return to the realm where Her life originated,
every soul belonging to this world derived its origin. All other
things owe their beginnings to her terror and sorrow. From her tears
all that is of liquid nature was formed. From her smile all that
is lucent in nature. From her grief and perplexity, all the corporeal
elements of the world. (Ch. V, 2-3)

Compare this account to the legend of the Thompson Indians, cited
in the Commentary on the Prelude of the Gaia Mythos:

At first Kujum-Chantu, the earth, was like a human being,
a woman with a head, and arms and legs, and an enormous belly.
The original
humans lived on the surface of her belly [The legend recounts
how the Old One] transformed the sky woman into the present
earth. Her
hair became the trees and grass; her flesh, the clay; her
bones, the rocks; and her blood, the springs of water. (Charles
H. Long, Alpha:
The Myths of Creation, p. 36-37.)

Time and time again, Gnostic visionary teaching is corroborated
by indigenous lore. This makes sense if we regard Gnosticism
as an advanced or
highly formalized brand of shamanism, a visionary method of
high sophistication that arises from the
same ecstatic encounter with Sacred
Nature as shamanic practices in native cultures around the
world.

Call to Coevolution

Such is my expanded paraphrase of Trim. Prot., transposed
into astronomical terms. Where do we go from here? The third
phase of Sophia's descent is still in progress, for the cosmic
Aeon, departed
from its normal sphere of activity, now persists as the living
earth. Here we must extrapolate again in order to form some
notion of humanity's
role in Sophia's experience.

In the third stage, Sophia's long process of incarnation shifts
toward a coevolving phase. With the emergence of the human
species on earth,
the Protennoia or germinal dream of the Aeon "assumes a human appearance." This
does not mean that God, or more precisely, the Goddess, appears
on Earth in
human form, but that the appearance of humans on Earth is a
particular expressionof the dreaming of the Goddess, a display of her intelligence.
Let's recall that Sophia in Greek means "wisdom." In
humanity, a particular form of cosmic wisdom is germinating.
In some way we are just now beginning to understand,
Sophia evolves life on earth, not exclusively for human purposes, but to
invite human participation in Her story. We
participate through
cultivating the wisdom endowment She has implanted in us. Part of this endowment is the luminous epinoia, the power of free-form creative imagination.

In other words, Gaia-Sophia endows human beings with the capacity
for co-evolution by participation in Her story through the power of imagination. Other, non-human creatures participate more closely with her because their instinct-programs stay true to her purposes, but we have considerable latitude for play and variance, novelty and improvisation. However, such latitude also introduces the risk of deviance from Gaia's life plan. Initially, we begin to participate in a naive manner, lacking a clear and conscious conception of what co-evolution
is and how we might pursue it. We lack a motive specific to our unique angle of involvement in Gaia's purposes. Of what particular use are we to the planet? The art and science of the Mysteries was to answer this question and teach the uniquely human motive, aim, telos. Like physics or athletics, telestics is a discipline: namely, the theory and practice of teleology, the study of purposes. The genius of the telestai, "those who are aimed," inhered in their capacity to intestigate and communicate the purpose of human participation in the Dreaming of the Aeon Sophia, the wisdom goddess embodied in this rare and beautiful planet we inhabit.

In all other species on earth, cosmic wisdom is also present,
of course. In many ways it is more perfectly and harmoniously
displayed by non-human
creatures. As just noted, other creatures have far less latitude to stray from Gaia's instinct programs. Our capacity to experiment, innovate, and extrapolate efforts toward preconceived aims, comes with the risk of deviating from harmony with the order of terrestrial evolution, Gaia's Dreaming. Fortunately, we can rely on the support and instruction of animals and plants to correct our deviance. Wild animals are profound teachers. Domestic animals are wonderful healers and guides. Some species of plants have psychoactive chemicals identical to the neurotransmitters in the human brain. Such species are called teacher-plants and sacred medicine plants due to their ability to illuminate our minds and heal us in mind and body alike.

James Cameron's fim Avatar (2009) is the first masterpiece of genuine Gaian science fiction, Gi-fi. It depicts an indigenous race, the blue-skinned Ha'vi who live on an earth-like planet, Pandora. The Ha'vi live in deep immersion with the ecology of their habitat. They practice linking with plants, birds, and animals to stay in harmony with Eywa, the Gaia-like goddess embodied in Pandora. For us today, participation in the life-story of Gaia-Sophia also requires an act of linkage or bonding. To know and love the story is one thing, and absolutely essential, of course. But to enact the story with the Goddess of the home planet, is something else again. Avatar uses computer-generated images to depict a world of beuaty and wonderment, as this world of ours would look in the thrill of that enactment. This film speaks to the desire in so many human hearts, unstated but starting to stir, to be alive in Gaia's Dreaming with her, and to discover our true role in the symbiosis of the planetary weave.

Indigenous people assert that we humans
are kin to all species and depend for our survival on non-human
allies, such
as sacred teaching plants and "power animals." These non-human forms of intelligence life can show us how to apply
Sophianic intelligence because they are, in many ways, better
at it than
we are, more faithful to the overall plan.
Native American teachings warn that "our humanity remains
incomplete and unhinged' until we have received such empowerment
from other-than-human
beings." (Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology,
p. 111) All too often we feel tragically alone with what we
know, trapped in our particular way of apprehending the external world, imprisoned by our maps, models, symbols, and languages. We falsely
believe human intelligence is
a freak phenomenon, superior to all other forms, separated from all other forms. But in the Gnostic perspective, the status
of the human
species is not one of superiority but of uniqueness:

Human uniqueness—not to be mistaken for superiority—inheres in the special responsibility to respond through conscious and playful collaboration to Gaia-Sophia's designs for life, and perhaps even modify those designs by intimate knowledge of Her intentions.

Trimorphic Protennoia informs us succinctly how Sophia, upon
becoming the Earth, offers a special opportunity to humanity.
She "introduces
the illuminatory baptismal light of the Five Seals." This
means that from the original Pleromic light which She was and
still is—the torrential nougat-like current of the Organic Light that may be encountered directly in hyperception or trance awareness—Sophia
makes available a kind of extract, consisting of five potentials
or faculties. The Five Seals obviously refers to the five senses, with the implication of something sealed or secreted within the senses. The language here is deeply mystical, using a
insider
jargon from the Mystery Schools. The "seals" also refer
to five powers inherent to nous, the divine intelligence.
These powers are: extrapolation, self-correction, goal-orientation,
communication,
and transmutation. Each of these faculties is an extension or extrapolation of one of the five senses:

sight: goal-oriention, seeing ahead to an aim or resulthearing: self-correction, listening to the instructive voice that tells you how to adjust what you perceive, express, and enact: intuitive learningtaste: extrapolation, advancing from the mere taste of something to the full experience of ingesting it, making it embodied, innate to your mind and bodytouch: communication, verbal and non-verbal, as a form of bonding and rapturous empathysmell: transmutation, based on the reading of chemical signals to monitor and induce biochemical changes (cf. epigenetics, the "biology of belief," and transductive hormones triggered by the olfactory sense)

The initiation program of the Mysteries
was set up to produce and test these powers in the neophytes.
The Mystery Schools
were universities for the practice of noetic sciences,
cultivation of co-evolutionary mind. Today, this practice re-emerges in Planetary Tantra with its paradigm for telluric enhancement of the five senses represented by five Diamond Sky Dakinis in the vajra star of the Shakti Cluster.

If humans claim and cultivate their Sophianic endowment, the
Goddess will be able to "restore her members into the
light." In
other words, what Sophia does through humanity is somehow crucial
to re-evolving Her connection of her own capacities ("members")
to the Pleroma. This is what Gnostics taught
about human involvement in Her "redemptive" process.
The Mystery School term for this process is "correction." The Apocryphon
of John (NHC
II, 1, 23: lines 20-22) says:

And our Sister Sophia is she who came
down in innocence in order to correct her deficiency.

Elsewhere this process is called Sophia's "rectification." As
Sophia realigns Herself with the Pleroma, humanity is, somehow,
deeply implicated in the process. (For more on this tremendous
prospect, see correction in
the Lexicon.) In a nutshell, the theme of correction comprises the supreme teaching of the Sophianic
vision, the redemptive cosmology of Gnosis. The sacred narrative of the Mysteries offers the prototype for the current notion of planetary shift: the realignment of Sophia to the galactic center, the Pleroma.

Open Revelation

Given all this background, what are we to make of the obscure
proclamations in NHC XIII? Truth be told, there is almost no
cosmological content
in Trim. Prot.! The text consists of rough notes on
a "revelation
discourse" in which a Gnostic visionary recalls or recapitulates
the descent of the Goddess, but not in a concrete way. Phases
of Sophia's engagement in the extra-Pleromic realm are described,
but not graphic cosmological
stages as such. The discourse has to be transposed imaginatively
to produce a vivid cosmological picture story.

Such revelations have been called "visionary recitals" by
Henry Corbin, a scholar of Sufi mysticism whose most well-known
work is Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi.
Corbin coined the term "imaginal" to emphasize that
what the genuine mystic sees is not imagined (i.e., falsely
invented), nor is it merely
imaginary (a product of psychic activity, detached from the
real world). Rather, he or she see a visionary as opposed to
a sensorial "reality."

Several texts in the NHC are visionary recitals that provide
vital segments of the Gaia Mythos. These texts probably represent
transcriptions
of notes taken by students on lectures given by initiates who
reported their experiences in altered states. The notes would
have enabled classes
of upcoming students (neophytes) to "review" what
their teachers saw in visionary states, as a preparation for
exploring those states
in their turn. Literally, "review" means to re-view
or re-see. If successful, the training of the neophytes led
them to re-see what
had already been witnessed and transmitted by their teachers.
Each re-seeing was consistent with initiatic experience and,
at
the same time,
enriched with new
content, for the manifestation of the Divine to the human mind
is an open and ongoing revelation. Hence the co-evolutionary
project of Gnosis.

Opponents of the Gnostics accused them of writing too many
books and inventing all manner of complications to explain
the cosmos and the
human condition. They rejected the possibility of rich, ever-evolving
revelation. For the Church Fathers the revelation of the Father
God through Jesus Christ was a one-time-only event, and the
story was simple
and stable. (Upon close analysis, it is anything but, but that
is another issue.) Because Gnostic method left revelation open,
its practitioners
were involved in a continual process of rediscovery and re-imagination,
encompassing the entire course of evolution. They accessed "cosmic
memory" to review over and over again the descent of the
Wisdom Goddess and refine their understanding of how humanity
emerged in Her
Dreaming, and how we are implicated in Her "correction."

To be Gnostically oriented today means that each human individual has something to contribute to this process of re-imagination.

Erotic Power

The cosmic detailing
of the coco de mer, the icon for the Gaia Mythos, pictures
the original Dreaming of Sophia "in a nutshell," if you will! Episodes 5, 6 and 8 of
the Gaia Mythos recount the conditions that prevailed before
Sophia plunged beyond the Pleroma, taking Her Dreaming with
Her into the lower world. To summarize briefly those Episodes:

Episode Five describes how Sophia acted within the Pleroma, paired
with another Aeon, Christos, to prepare the emanation of the singularity
and produce a new existential world in the outer limbs of the galaxy.

In Episode Six, a sacred boundary is defined and sealed, so that
the Aeons can remain within the core as their emanation pours outward,
like the shaft
of a searchlight. The result is a mortal emanation, Atu Kadmon -
the template for the human species. It is deposited in a molecular
cloud
in the third
zone of the spiral arms, in the Orion Nebula.

Episode Eight describes how Sophia is fascinated by this template.
While the other twelve Aeons who fashion the boundary withdraw into
the interior of the Pleroma, She, the thirteenth
Aeon, remains at the border, gazing outward
at the luminous emulsion hung in the galactic limbs. Eventually,
She is lured through the
bounding membrane of the core, and the Goddess "falls."

Now we must try to imagine what Sophia dreams as She contemplates
the template of the Anthropos, the human genome, before Her plunge. While
She is still within the proper limits of the Pleroma, She produces
the Dreaming of a world to come. Yet She does so in an
anomalous manner, by Herself, without pairing off and sharing
Her vision with
another Aeon. This is, not a violation, but a departure from
the usual operations of cosmic law. "For it
is the will of the Originator not to allow anything to happen
in the Pleroma apart from
a syzygy." (NHLE 1996, p. 486. Syzygy, pronounced
SIZZ-uh-GEE, means pairing, coupling.) The will of the Originator
does not constrain
the Generators, the Aeons who always remain free to act without
a counterpart.

The Aeonic Goddess Sophia has no counterpart on earth or in the planetary realms, so sexual pairing assumes a particular role in her Dreaming. In the human species, conjugation of the sexes is not bound to a cosmic plan or restricted to reproductive purposes. By reason of being liberated from biological imperatives, sexual desire in human beings can to be creatively engaged in Gaia's designs. Her Dreaming is charged with massive erotic power.

The Coco De Mer pictures graphically the triple
world system Sophia originally intended to emanate: trimorphic protennoia. It is also a natural metamorph of the human female pelvis. In India where coco de mer nuts wash up on the beaches, they are kept in temples as holy icons of the vulva of the Goddess.

Let's imagine that in the original moment of Her Dreaming,
Sophia previews a world order that might arise for the Anthropos,
the human species, but
this is not in fact the world order that does arise from Her
descent.
Hence the odd Gnostic instruction, "The world system we inhabit came about by a mistake" i.e. as a fluke, an anomaly (cited again below). The material of Trim. Prot. and other texts, as well
as the polemic paraphrases, all agree on one crucial point:
when Sophia plunges
from Pleroma, the effects that She produces in elementary matter
are weird and unexpected. She has an initial vision of a world
order, yes,
and presumably She retains it on Her descent, but the world
system in which She becomes enmeshed does not entirely and
consistently
reflect Her original moment of Dreaming. Sophia's trimorphic
protennoia,
the threefold primal intent of her Dreaming, was skewed by
unforeseen conditions outside the Pleromic Core.

In Her solitary dreaming Sophia
imagined a threefold world order far out in the galactic
limbs - a planetary system consisting of one star, a planet
and a moon, but this was not the system that
arose due to Her fall. The Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3, 75.1) contains
a famous one-liner that describes this bizarre development: "The
world came about through a mistake."

High Strangeness

This much-quoted line has been used against the Gnostics who
are accused of hating and rejecting the material world (nature,
the earth) because
they regard it as an inferior, flawed creation. Nothing could
be further from the truth. I submit that it is just this, the
mistaken character
of our world, its deviance from the original Dreaming of Sophia,
that engaged the Gnostics in empathy with the earth and the
Goddess embodied
in it. Seeing cosmic events in affectively charged vision,
they realized that Sophia's fall subjected Her to gravitational
forces that do not
apply to the mass-free hyper-porosity of Aeonic currents in
the Pleroma. Lacarriere writes: "What haunts them [the
Gnostics] is the intolerable awareness that this inhibiting
matter is the result of an error, a
deviation in the cosmic order" (p. 22).

The line from Gos. Phil. could be called a proposition
of "high
strangeness." This term is often applied to ET/UFO lore,
and it may prove relevant to Gnostic teachings as
well. In the "Afterword"
to the 1996 edition of the Nag Hammadi Library in English,
Gnostic scholar Richard Smith compares the visions of Gnostic
cosmology to science fiction, and relates the Sophia Mythos
to numerous books
and films in that genre. Among others he cites Philip K.
Dick, whose Valis
Trilogy is a retelling of the Fallen Goddess scenario.
Dick himself attributed his involvement with the Sophia Mythos
to a mystical experience
he underwent in March 1974, at the age of 46, when a ray of
light released a massive download of information into his mind.
This experience
is consistent with Gnostic illumination resulting in the "visionary
recital." Dick's wrote down his in a 200,000
text (as yet unpublished) which he called "The
Exegesis."

Throughout the Valis trilogy Dick explores the question
of how the wisdom of Sophia can assert itself in
the fallen world She has produced, thus liberating humans from
their distorted
perception of reality. Dick was convinced that gnosis is special
knowledge of our delusional state, revealing how we are deviated.
In Valis he
attempts to show that only Gnosis can save us from being victims,
if not accessories, to the evil and insane patterns of behavior
that arise in and around us,
not because we are sinful by nature, but because we are ignorant
of our true nature.

Gnostic cosmology includes some outrageously strange propositions
that work beautifully as science fiction plots. "High strangeness"
may be just what we need to get to the ultimate truth about
the human condition
on this troubled planet.

A Two-Source Hologram

Sophia's original Dreaming of a world
outside the Pleroma persisted, even though the world system
in which the earth was captured was not the one She initially
imagined. In
effect, She ended up living in two systems at once. And earthbound humanity,
one strain of the embodiment of the Anthropos, is right in there with Her.

Philip K. Dick described the bizarre two-world scenario of
the Gnostics in the brilliant metaphor of "a two-source
hologram." (Valis,
p. 178) Holograms (or holographs) are quasi-objects produced
by an arrangement of laser beams and mirrors that project into
three dimensions
a flat image registered on a plate. Imagine the hologram of
a house, projected from an image on one plate, superimposed
on another hologram
of a similar but structurally different house, projected from
another plate. Both holograms merge to produce a setting whose
inhabitants
may feel disoriented without knowing why. They may sense, for
instance, that they both belong and don't belong in the setting.
In some ways
they feel quite at home, but in other ways they do things to
their habitat that are inconsistent with their survival in
it. For the moment the analogy needs no further elaboration.

Before Her plunge Sophia imagined a world outside the Pleroma,
the "Triple-Formed
Original Thought." This is the world order She intended
before She fell into chaos. It is a system composed of three
components: a
star (sun), a planet, and a moon, the satellite of the planet.
This is the most simple example of a world system that can
arise within the known laws of cosmic physics. The planet
requires a satellite as an "out-rider" or
armature so that it can develop conditions for life that will
not be overwhelmed by the immense force of the solar body,
the mother star. The world-order thus produced is gourd-like,
with
the sun and moon forming the "husk" of the system,
and the planet (Earth) the juicy pulp - as the coco de mer
icon shows by the tumidity of the slit. (The gourd
analogy is a cosmological trope that plays an explanatory role
in other contexts as well. In Sacred Land, Sacred Sex,
Rapture of the Deep,
Dolores LaChapelle has described how the gourd may be viewed
as the first instrument of humanity's civilizing activities.)

The world order previewed by Sophia in the original moment
when She gazed from the galactic core out to the spiraling
limbs does not come
to be, but Her vision does not falter from its original design. Despite the deviant world
system brought about by Her fall, Sophia's undeviated
vision persists and allows for correction of
the world system we inhabit. The correction is achieved, in
part, through human coevolution with Gaia's purposes. This
is the essence
of Gnostic teaching on redemptive cosmology.

The coco de mer icon both triggers and anchors
the memory of this teaching.Knowing this to be so,
and experiencing it empathically and imaginally, engages us
in Sophia's correction.
Our responsibility to the earth depends on our involvement
in a supra-earthly vision - our total, experiential, even visceral
involvement. As Dick's protagonist says,
regarding the bizarre notion of the two-source hologram: "But
intellectually thinking it is one thing, and finding out it's
true is another!" (Valis, p. 179)

Gnostics taught that the cosmos we inhabit came about by an
error, an anomaly, and we are involved in how it is being corrected.
The coco
de mer recenters us in Sophia's Dreaming so that we can
grow into an understanding of our role in Gaia's cosmic realignment,
Her way home
to Her source.

The Three-Body World

By visualizing the three-body world, we orient ourselves imaginally to
Gaia's Dreaming. This image reminds us to distinguish Earth
from the rest of the planetary system. Gnostic texts always refer
to the cosmos
(kosmos in Greek) as distinct from the earth
itself (ge in Greek) . (In both cases the Coptic
words, which I cannot reproduce here because they do not convert
in html, are direct transcriptions
of the Greek words.) The kosmos produced by
Sophia's initial impact in the realm of elementary matter is
not the home
planet we inhabit, not the planet Earth, for the
Earth was formed differently from the rest of the planetary system.
This concept is fundamental to Gnostic cosmology. It is of course
complete nonsense in scientific
terms. It is "high strangeness" all dressed up in a
mystic veil of fantasy. Let's consider
this weird notion
for a moment, just to see where it takes us.

The "mistake" cited in the Gospel of Philip was
not the act of solitary Dreaming by the Aeon Sophia, but the
unforeseen impact of Her plunge from the Pleroma. Her tumultuous
descent into
the galactic limbs produced conditions that resulted in the
emergence of a planetary system distinct from Earth. This
is the kosmos we
inhabit, the realm of the Archons who arose first, before Earth
did. In the language of materialistic science, the cosmos outside
Earth is the realm of inorganic
chemistry. One of the great mysteries of science is how the
organic, the living, arises from the inorganic, the non-living.
(Theodore Roszak
quotes an anonymous version of modern cosmology: "Hydrogen
is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, turns into
people.") The question of how life arose from the lifeless
can be answered quite directly in Gnostic terms, but it also
needs to be reframed, because
it
is not
quite
the right question.
Inorganic matter is also alive, albeit in its own way. The
real question is, How do the living structures of inorganic
chemistry
relate
to the structures
of organic life? This is tantamount to asking, How do the Archons,
who are inorganic beings, relate to humans, who are organic
beings?

Much of Gnostic writing was concerned with this question of
the two orders of life, organic and inorganic, terrestrial
and Archontic, yet the issue of the Archons is entirely disregarded
by scholars.
It
is not
even
dismissed
as superstitious
nonsense,
but is merely
passed
over in silence, deemed unworthy of comment.

By distinguishing rigorously between the earth and the extra-terrestrial
planetary system, Gnostics were proposing a conceptual model
of organic and inorganic worlds. The planetary system as such,
the cosmos,
does not provide a realm where humanity can live, only the home planet does. All this is true to the facts of
astronomy and biology as we understand them today. So far the
outrageous theory stated in the
one-liner from the Gospel of Philip carries reasonable
information. It makes perfect sense in terms of what we know
about
the physics of the solar system. The catch is, modern astronomy
does not allow that Earth's genesis was different from that
of the other planets.

The Gaia Hypothesis, now more commonly known as Gaia Theory,
first emerged in 1976 with James Lovelock's reflections on
the contrast between
the lifeless atmosphere of mars and the life-filled atmosphere
of Earth. Gaia Theory cannot replace the vision-story of Sophia. It is, however, a
reliable homologue to
the Sophianic mythos that distinguishes between the lifeless
solar system and the life-bearing trinity of Earth-Sun-Moon. Gnostic cosmology
is visionary and
mythic, not scientific in the modern sense of the term, but
some impressive features of Gaia-compatible science can be extracted from
it, as we shall
see.